Let The Disappointment With Biden's Ed Department Begin

 Well, that didn't take long.

Back in October, top Biden aid Stef Feldman spoke to Education Writers Association members about ed policy. It was... not encouraging. She didn't make a "firm commitment" about state testing waivers, an odd stance for someone who promised to put an end to high stakes testing. She stood by the "former public school educator" promise, but as many of us have noted, depending on how Biden defines his terms, Michelle Rhee would fit the bill. Blerg. Excuse me-- I gave myself the shivers for a minute there.

A variety of topics came up. Biden wants to re-open schools by using a massive funding wave to get schools what they need to be safe (including FEMA funding), which is okay, but also using argle bargle like "ensuring high-quality learning during the pandemic." He's going to roll back a bunch of Trump-era rollbacks of Obama-era guidance. More Title I. Boost teacher pay. Nice ideas--I'm sure Mitch McConnell will go right along. SEL. HBCUs. MSIs. Maybe get back to supporting civil rights. Excellent. All fine things.

Also, student loan legislation, police on campus (yes, but with training), for-profit colleges must "prove their value (smh), early learning (the low-hanging fruit of ed policy), repairing school buildings, fund it all with taxes on super-wealthy and big corporations. No on school segregation.

But about charter schools. 

As President, Biden will ban for-profit charter schools from receiving federal funding

Nope. This is the old Clinton-era fall back designed to make both charter fans and charter opponents happy. Only California and Arizona allow for-profits in the first place. In the second place, there are plenty of ways to make a ton of money from "nonprofit" charters. So this ban is about as useful as declaring that the feds won't fund any charters located on toxic waste dumps--it's a good policy to have, but it doesn't really address the main issues. Feldman goes on to say that Biden says that the feds will stop funding nonprofits "that don't provide results," which is exceptionally vague (Feldman "clarified" that the USED would have to figure that out). He does score a good point by saying that all charters must "be authorized and held accountable by democratically-elected bodies like school boards," which shows that somebody groks one important issue.

Sanders got the issues better than this, and the "unity" document did as well. This is a step back. 

Today we get a look at the "agency review teams," and the education team is...well, not encouraging.

We already knew that Linda Darling-Hammond, loved by some and mistrusted by others, is heading it up. Here's some of the mix-- folks from the Education Trust, Learning Policy Institute, Alliance for Excellent Education, Teach Plus, and the Century Foundation. Ruthanne Buck, a senior advisor at the department with Duncan and King is here. She's also an old AFT hand, which I note only because there are three AFT staffers in the group; just one from NEA. There's some overlap, too-- Ary Amerikaner is VP of the Education Trust and former Obama USED staffer. The Teach Plus rep is CEO Roberto Rodriguez, another Obama alum (his bio says "From 2009 to 2017, he developed and led President Obama’s education initiatives to build systemic change and improve opportunity and outcomes across the educational continuum.")

If you have been holding your breath, waiting and worrying about whether or not Biden is going to take us back to the days of education under Obama--well, there's not a lot here to set your mind at ease. It is probably best to hold judgment and wait to see what they come up with, who the new secretary will be, what actual policies are going to be supported by the new administration. This week's news is just another reminder that just because Betsy DeVos is on her way out doesn't mean public ed supporters can stop being vigilant. For what it's worth, these people are volunteering to do a difficult job that is even more difficult than usual given the mess being created by President Hissy Fit, and for that, they do deserve some thanks. And it's hugely unlikely that we won't end up in a better place than we are now. In the meantime, you can choose to be either disappointed or hopeful, depending on how you're inclined. Whatever your inclination, keep both eyes open.

Donors Choose Mondays At The Institute

It sucks that Donors Choose exists. For those unfamiliar, it's basically a Go Fund Me for classrooms instead of medical problems.

Like all such charities, it occasionally pops up in the news because some celebrity and/or business decides to sponsor a bunch of projects (like that time with Katy Perry and Staples) and we get a bunch of warm fuzzy stories and I just hate that stuff, because we shouldn't be celebrating the fact that schools are so underfunded that teachers have to depend on charity to help get the job done. 

But here's the thing. We are where we are. I think the custom of tipping food servers is stupid and terrible and should be done away with yesterday. But if I refuse to tip my server because I disagree with the system, I'm just being a jerk. I don't like enabling a system that's failing classroom teachers, but we are where we are, and especially now that I'm comfortably retired, I'm okay involving the institute in small time philanthropy. Donors Choose makes it easy for someone like me who is out in rural small town America to help. And what we've been through in the last month or four years or so has sort of reminded me that it's important to take active steps to make the world marginally better.

And yes, some of what turns up on Donors Choose makes me scratch my head and ask, "Really??" But then, I can still choose.

So here's what I'm going to do. Mondays, I'll be looking at Donors Choose to find a cause that speaks to me, and I will share a link here. I invite you to join me in helping somebody's modest classroom dream come through. Or go ahead and pick one of your own. Or if you know of a local need, help with that (some schools forbid teachers from using these kinds of sites, presumably because they are justifiably embarrassed that their teachers have to go begging). 

This week I'm donating to a third grade classroom in Waukegan, IL. They'd like some actual physical books to read as a class while in distance learning mode. You can follow the link here.

Yes, Donors Change is not the systemic change we're looking for. But while we're still hoping and working for that change to come, it's a way to help. My wife's school has gone now to hybrid schooling, which is one more tremendous drag on her, and I have to sit here at the institute and feel largely helpless to make her work easier. I've been doing this for about a month and in these messy time, it has helped me feel as if I'm doing something concrete in the world. So if this platform can help some actual teachers do their jobs in these miserable times, I'm for that. You're invited to join in.

ICYMI: That Was A Week All Righty Edition (11/8)

 Has it only been a week since we got together here? Seems like that was in a whole different world, and I have a feeling that we have a few more to go through before we're done. But as soon as the last echoes of Beloved Leader's 1,732 lawsuits dies down, maybe we can get back to doing some important stuff and not dying and--well, won't it just be nice not to have to have him barging into our consciousness every damn day. 

In the meantime, Other Stuff is still going on. Here's some reading.

When Jesus Needs a Visitor's Badge

Blue Cereal Education has been working his research muscles on the issues of church-school separation, and he has three reads to recommend.

Success Academy Will Be Remote Through March 2021  

This Chalkbeat story is worth noting because to listen to some folks talk, the only reason any schools have closed in this country is because of those damned selfish teachers unions. Apparently not.

The Wildest of Wild Weeks  

This post at eduhonesty is from way back on Thursday, and it offers some good thoughts on the ongoing discussion of how much political talk should be allowed into the classroom.

The Post-Espinoza End Game   

This is from way back in July, but I find I keep going back to these insights from Bruce Baker and Preston Green, and something tells me the issues involved here are going to keep flaring up, so study up. Speaking of which...

How The Court Inverted Constitutional Protections Against Discrimination

Leah Litman is at the Atlantic looking at how SCOTUS has been flipping the First Amendment all sideways. Again, this is going to come up again. And again.

Schools Adopt Facial Recognition in the Name of Fighting Covid  

Wired takes a look at these shenanigans. More surveillance state baloney.

Proctorio used DMCA to take down a student's critical tweets  

This is a trick we've seen before, back when a certain test manufacturer was running around getting blog posts taken down because the brutal criticism involved vaguely describing test content. Proctorio has proven to be mighty aggressive in shutting up its critics. Here's one more example.

Overstating Nothing  

Paul Thomas offers some excellent thoughts about student writing and the art of being both grandiose and vague.

In Some Ways, This Is Worse Than 2016  

Nancy Flanagan says much of what I'm thinking. The actual election doesn't change the actual underlying issues.

Betsy DeVos Will Be Leaving. Prepare To Curb Your Enthusiasm.

It has been a few hours since the race was finally called, and now, once we get past a few hundred petulant lawsuits, the Trump Train will be leaving DC (undoubtedly kicking over every table it can find on the way out).

That means that Betsy DeVos will be leaving the department of education, and that is unquestionably, undeniably a good thing. And if you want to celebrate it for the rest of the weekend, I don't want to take that away from you--just put a pin in this post and come back to it Monday.

Feel better? I certainly do. Now then...

DeVos is almost certainly not going away. She has devoted her entire adult life to the pursuit of privatized, Christianized education, to a system that aids the Betters and keeps the Lessers in their proper place, to a world in which the wealthy can hold onto their well-deserved piles of money without having to use any of it to pay for nice things for Those People. She is not going to stop now.

She is far more experienced and suited to the life of a billionaire political operative than that of a government bureaucrat. That is what she knows how to do (hell, Secretary of Education is the only actual job she's ever had). In some ways, she did more damage as a private citizen then a government functionary. Ask any education advocate from Michigan--the DeVos family has mastered the art of checkbook advocacy, of backing politicians who will do their bidding and threatening those that won't. In fact, the DeVos family never stopped--they raised money for John James, even though he ultimately lost.

That loss (and a few others) may signal how things have changed for DeVos. For much of her career, she was able to operate somewhat stealthily. She now has spectacular name recognition--and it's not very good recognition at that. "This candidate is back by Betsy DeVos," is likely to be an albatross around the neck of any future politicians willing to answer her call. She has attained a huge level of unpopularity among the general public, and teachers at one point reported they dislike her more than they disliked Trump (sadly, plenty of teachers once again voted for Beloved Leader). 

But if you think DeVos's departure from office means you've heard the last of her--well, no. She's only in her early sixties, she's wealthy, and she is a righteous True Believer. I know some folks think her stint at USED was about power and money, but I don't believe it. She wants to transform the world into the one that she believes it should be, having gotten her marching orders from GodJesus himself. I believe she has always been absolutely sincere about wanting to do away with her job. 

What Biden gives us in her place is another conversation that we'll have for the next many weeks. I'm not encouraged that DFER has some "helpful suggestions," and I'm not excited about some of the company he keeps. So we'll just see. That could be awesome, or go horribly wrong. We'll see.

But do not take everything you've learned about DeVos in the past three years and just toss it away because you think you'll never have to deal with her again. The right wing school choice crowd has been clearing ground for a path to privatized Voucherland Christianist schooling; it runs right through the Supreme Court, and the election of Joe Biden doesn't change any of that a bit. What changes now is that Betsy DeVos is one more private citizen who can help bankroll and coordinate further attacks on public education in this country. And she still has a few weeks to set fire to the offices before she leaves. 

That will be partially balanced by some new heft in certain quarters, because for some like-minded folks the allure of the title just never entirely wears off (I'd say that was ridiculous, but here we all are still hearing Arne Duncan offer pearls of wisdom years after he slunk out of the office). In some places, folks think she's done awesome work (looking at you, Florida politics man). 

Four years ago most public ed supporters only kind of knew who DeVos was. Some didn't know her at all. Now we all know her a bit too well. I recommend that we keep that knowledge handy and stay alert in the years ahead.

In the meantime, enjoy this moment. 

New Update From What Is No Longer The Trailing Edge of the Pandemic

It has been just about two months since I told you that if anyone had a shot of starting school up without major Covid consequences, it would be my little corner of the world. I'm here to report that things are not going well.

Back on September 7, the number of cases for the whole county, since March, was 70. People were not panicked, but cautious, with the usual outlying groups of deniers and total freak-outers. Okay, lots of deniers--this is Trump country, and at this point locals know that there are some stores you avoid if you take masking seriously. Our four school districts went ahead and opened, with two choosing a sort of gradual "soft" opening, and the other two just going for it. 

By October 15, the number of cases had doubled. Two of the four high schools had had two cases each. One shut down to clean for 48 hours; the other sent forty students to isolation. Everyone's sports are still going on, but with limited audiences. 

Yesterday, the state said we had our highest single day total--46 confirmed cases. I'm sure that's nothing in major cities, but we've got fewer than 50K in the whole county. And our totals are probably lagging because there is no place to go get tested in this county. 

That brings our grand total to 359. As you can see, we're escalating quickly. 

In schools, things are going poorly. At my former district, somehow, they managed to expose the entire administration team, so all administrators and most of the main office staff have been in isolation. This week the district has gone to virtual school. Two weeks back, an entire fifth grade team was sent into isolation. In another district, three teachers have just tested positive. The state has met with several local superintendents, and schools are going to the hybrid model next week; one administrator has already told his people that after a week of hybrid, they'll be going virtual. 

Districts had protocols in place before the year started, but those aren't always being followed. Teachers are largely on a DIY basis for PPE. Plenty of folks, including some teachers, are pretty sure this is much ado about nothing. In the state in general, there's some question about what the rules and guidelines actually are, particularly since the GOP-led legislature took the Democratic governor to court over all of this. 

And as is the case across the country, some of our districts are demonstrating the problems of bad or non-existent leadership in difficult times, not to mention the issues that arise when administration has built zero trust with staff. 

We only have one death in the county so far, and the hospital still has room for a few more Covid cases. We'll see how this goes, but if you've ben imagining that little small town rural districts can dodge the pandemic problems of larger districts--well, that's not looking good. I'll keep you updated.

Trump's Executive Order for 1776 Commission

Like many of you, I'm hoping that Trump's Executive Order establishing a 1776 Commission will be rendered moot sometime within the next 12-2,215 hours. But because, like many of you, I need something to distract me from doomscrolling (and the board of directors is napping), I'm going to go ahead and look at this damn fool executive order. The short form is that this is all empty political hooey, but I'm trying to kill time here.

First, it has to be said that somebody at the White House has a real gift for hamfisted baloney writing. Right of the bat we get the purpose of this EO-- "to better enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776, and, through this, form a more perfect Union." Because he's sure he heard that "more perfect union" thingy in some patriotic program once. 

Let's go.

Section 1. Purpose.

The American founding envisioned a political order in harmony with the design of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” seeing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as embodied in and sanctioned by natural law and its traditions.

I'm not sure a "founding" can "envision" anything. Nor am I sure about "natural law" and its traditions. So much about this EO sets off a long-time English teachers detector for "this student does not understand the words and phrases that he has copied from some other source." 

It goes on to note that the formation of a republic (notice-- not a democracy, but a republic, as all good right-leaning mansplainers will tell you) makes us really different, because it secures "through a form of government that derives its legitimate power from the consent of the governed." Which kind of gives away the game on not understanding natural laws, because those are laws that are built into nature itself. This phrase is like saying "We will be a new physics department because we will be the first to operate with gravity." Nope. The natural law--governments exist only by consent of the governed--is natural and has always been there in every single government, whether they knew it or not. What was new was enlightenment thinkers teasing out that the consent thing was a hardwired part of how governments work.

Throughout its national life, our Republic’s exploration of the full meaning of these principles has led it through the ratification of a Constitution, civil war, the abolition of slavery, Reconstruction, and a series of domestic crises and world conflicts.

A weird list. First, Reconstruction (aka "the South wins some non-military victories in Civil War overtime") is not really something to brag about. Second, why just skip over everything else? My guess- because this whole EO is still rooted in being pissed about the 1619 project and people who say we're a racist country. This is the standard comeback-- we are not, because we fought a war to free the slaves, and everything has been mostly super for Black folks ever since.

The EO says "those events establish a clear historical record of an exceptional Nation dedicated to the ideas and ideals of its founding." Because he wants to get American exceptionalism in here somewhere.

Now the angry paragraph explaining that students are being taught to hate their own country (a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting, because, you know, maybe there were some other people who were pissed at the US too, but this isn't really their country). 

This radicalized view of American history lacks perspective, obscures virtues, twists motives, ignores or distorts facts, and magnifies flaws, resulting in the truth being concealed and history disfigured. Failing to identify, challenge, and correct this distorted perspective could fray and ultimately erase the bonds that knit our country and culture together.

Again, if we look at Trumpian history, we can note that "our country and culture" isn't meant to include everyone. Trump's "great uniter status" among his fans may be puzzling, unless you understand it to mean that Trump has been uniting Real Americans while pushing away all of Those People who Aren't Really Americans.

Now a couple of paragraphs of "we're not racist at all," featuring Abraham Lincoln and MLK. I take this as another hint that Trump didn't write this himself, because he's old enough and racist enough to have been one of the people vilifying MLK as a violent reactionary threatening our country and culture. 

Now, fasten your irony harness and sit down hard for this next part:

As these heroes demonstrated, the path to a renewed and confident national unity is through a rediscovery of a shared identity rooted in our founding principles. A loss of national confidence in these principles would place rising generations in jeopardy of a crippling self-doubt that could cause them to abandon faith in the common story that binds us to one another across our differences. Without our common faith in the equal right of every individual American to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, authoritarian visions of government and society could become increasingly alluring alternatives to self-government based on the consent of the people.

Yes, if the nation were ever to doubt some of its bedrock principles, a self-serving demagogue might use that. Such a leader might whip a core group into a frenzy by constantly scaring them with tales of Others that are coming to get them, and use that fear to install himself as a authoritarian leader, replacing allegiance to the country's principles with allegiance to himself. I'm wondering, and not for the first time-- does someone write this stuff completely oblivious to the self-description he's providing, or is it a joke ("Watch-- I'm going to tell them straight out what we're doing and they won't bat an eye")?

We're going to slip in some school choice here--the "restoration of American education" must be a local thing, and "parents and local school boards must be empowered to achieve greater choice and variety in curriculum." By the way, he wants you to know that this devotion to state and local control is why his administration "rejects the Common Core curriculum" and all efforts to impose national standards or curriculum. Yeah, he has no idea what he's talking about here.

Vigorous participation in local government has always been America’s laboratory of liberty and a key to what makes us exceptional. The best way to preserve the story of America’s founding principles is to live it in action by local communities reasserting control of how children receive patriotic education in their schools.

Is that what makes us exceptional? Because I thought it was all that other natural law consent of the governed stuff. Also, this graf begs the question-- who installed the evil country-hating curriculum that this is meant to countermand? Did not state and local boards adopt their own curriculum? If they are "reasserting" control, exactly who are they taking it back from? Because I'm pretty sure the feds didn't force anybody to adopt the 1619 project. I'm also pretty sure that most history textbooks are already plenty conservative (check this whole thread). But as already noted--political hooey.

Section 2. The President's Advisory 1776 Commission.

 120 days for the secretary of education to set this up. No more than 20 members, all appointed by the Pres. Two year term, because at the end of two years, this evaporates, because how much time do you need to whip up a complete and accurate approved patriotic history of the US. Can include folks from outside government, plus the following ex officio members (or their stand-ins): secretaries of state, defense, interior, housing and urban development and education; assistant to the President for domestic policy, and for intergovernmental affairs. Nobody gets paid for this

They have to crank out a report within a year, give some advice about celebrating the 250th USA birthday, implement a "Presidential 1776 Award" for students who know a bunch of Founding facts and stuff, make sure the patriotic education is incorporated into parks, battlefields, etc, oversee some grants, and whip up some PR activities. There will be a chair, and USED will come up with an Executive Director, as well as funding this thing. 

Section 3. Celebration of Constitution Day.

Schools gonna celebrate this day right, or we're gonna cut their federal funding. Because compliance is the American way. Also, yes, you are correct in thinking that all of the section 1 quotage is from the Declaration, not the Constitution.

Section 4. Prioritize the American Founding in Available Federal Resources.

Check the couch cushions. There has to be some money to fund this lying around somewhere, attached to some pre-existing programs. Just repurpose that stuff.

Section 5. General Provisions.

Disclaimers. This doesn't have enough force to push aside any actual laws or structures or jobs already in place.

You'll not9ice that while this has a purpose and a commission, it doesn't have a mission. The commission is supposed to meet and come up with... something. Not a curriculum, mind you, because that's not a federal job. Just write a report, in which this group of bureaucrats whips up a specially created version of 250 years or so of history. Sure.

Yes, it's a bunch of PR hooey, and may vanish entirely in the near future. Which is good, because political indoctrination is not the way you create patriots, and insisting that there's only one view of the past is not how you do history, and trying to codify a white nationalist view of our checkered and complicated past is not how you make America great. Nor is any of this how you raise real thinkers, but I've already talked about that. Here's hoping we don't ever have to talk about any of this again.

Survey: Pandemic Effects on Early Childhood Education

Defending the Early Years is an organization whose stated mission “is to work for a just, equitable, and quality early childhood education for every young child, by informing educators, administrators, and parents about how children develop and learn best and advocating for the active, playful, experiential approaches to learning informed by child development theory and evidence-based research.” 

DEY has done some valuable advocacy work around the issues of too-early academic instruction and the introduction of on-line pre-school (yes, that’s really a thing). This summer they conducted a survey looking at the effects of pandemic education, and they’ve just released the results.

Links to the survey were sent out through the organization’s social media accounts, so there is some self-selected tilt to the respondents, but since that tilt is likely to be toward people who care about early childhood education (and who have an internet connection), these results are still worth looking at.

The respondents are pretty evenly split between parents and teachers of children between 0 and 8 years. with a smaller group who are both.

A third of both parents and teachers were not working, with more than a third working full time from home. About two thirds of the parents reported their children were doing some sort of remote or online schooling. That broke down into 24% daily lessons less than an hour, 23% 1-2 hours, and 19% more than 2 hours. 31% had daily assignments to submit, while 38% submitted weekly.

Adjustment was a challenge. Only 15% of the parents reported that students had an easy or very easy adjustment, and only 23% of the parents reported an easy or very easy adjustment for themselves. From the teacher side, only about 1 in 5 teachers reported that more than half of students adjusted well across all ECE age groups. Virtually nobody thought that all students adjusted well. Of teachers, only about 1 in 5 reported an easy or very easy adjustment.

The survey also asked respondents to rate particular areas of concern. More than half of parents were somewhat to very concerned about all issues, but financial, returning to work, and children falling behind only drew under 60% of responses. The greatest number of parents rated an increase in child or parent stress as a concern, with more than 60% very concerned. Safely reopening schools and children missing social interaction with peers followed closely 87% and 90%. Academic concerns fell in the middle of the pack.

The areas of concern for the greatest number of teachers were safely reopening schools, establishing relationships with students, and an overall increase in stress for both children and teachers.

The survey also allowed for open-ended responses. Some tidbits from that portion include the not-surprising result that younger children “rarely stayed engaged with Zoom meetings” and that parents reported much of the online learning was not age appropriate. While many students found the entire process boring, some families did report that the experience increased communication and engagement within the family itself.

Technology itself was a challenge, a concerning result since the nature of the survey meant that respondents had, at least, a decent dependable internet connection. In areas less well-covered, the tech problems could only be worse.

The survey is from the beginning of last summer, which in pandemic terms seems to be about a thousand years ago, and we can reasonably expect that some districts are better-prepared and more well-organized this fall than they were last spring. But the results of the survey still provide one more set of data points about how teachers and parents working with the very youngest children are experiencing pandemic emergency schooling. The full report is worth a look.

Originally posted at Forbes.com